Poet Aamir Aziz has accused renowned artist Anita Dube of using his widely recognised poem 'Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega' in her artworks "without his knowledge".
The issue came to light when Aziz was informed that excerpts from his poems were stitched into an artwork at display at Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery on March 18. Aziz said he had no prior idea that his poetry was being used and sold as part of Dube’s work.
“When I confronted her, she made it seem normal—like lifting a living poet’s work and branding it into her own, to be sold in elite galleries for lakhs of rupees, was normal,” Aziz wrote in a statement on Instagram adding, “But the more I looked, the worse it got.”
He later discovered that Dube had used his poem before, including in a 2023 exhibition curated by Arshiya Lokhandwala, without ever informing him. “She hid it. Deliberately,” he alleged.
While Aziz said that he supports people using his poetry in protests and public movements, he added that this case was different. “This is not solidarity. This is not homage. This is not conceptual borrowing. This is theft. This is erasure.”
He described Dube’s actions as part of a larger problem in the art world, where creators from marginalized backgrounds are mined for their work, then excluded from the profit and recognition that follows. “This is the art world feeding on the very margins it claims to stand with,” he wrote. “It is the systematic erasure of authorship in favour of monetary profit," the poet added.
Despite sending legal notices and asking for the work to be taken down, Aziz says he was met with “silence, half-truths, and insulting offers.” The gallery has refused to remove the work, and the exhibition is scheduled to run until April 26.
Calling Dube’s use of his defiant poem in commercial art deeply ironic, Aziz added, “A poem written in defiance was gutted, defanged, and stitched into velvet for profit. That a poet’s voice was looted, and the looters still pretend to be revolutionaries.”
Aamir Aziz became famous during the CAA-NRC protests, where his poem 'Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega' became popular as a defiance against the Citizenship Amendment Act, which a significant section of people claimed to be discriminartory.
Anita Dube is a visual artist, who works with a conceptual language that valorizes the sculptural fragment as a bearer of personal and social memory, history, mythology, and phenomenological experience. Her current exhibition 'Three Storey House' is at display in the Vadhera Art Gallery in the national capital.
